Suppose You Wake Up Free Tomorrow.

You could even walk around naked!

I'd go take the startup job I turned down two years ago because I was worried about job security due to regulation (and I was right - the founder had to lay off all the employees a few months ago because the state of CA is in the pocket of Amex, Visa, and Mastercard).

Actually, no, I wouldn't... that'd be in Palo Alto, and I like working in SF too much.

If it also meant the end of my student loans, I'd go build a startup. Tomorrow. Otherwise, not much would change.

I'm struggling to get into your line of thinking, can you give some examples of things that are currently illegal that I would be able to do?

Hookers and blow! arty:

Don't think "illegal". Think "burdensome."

I live on a golf course. There was a tree in my backyard, on my property, that was too big and too close to my house. I wanted it gone. The tree was in a buffer separating two fairways, and this buffer is a "wetland". I could cut the tree down, but only after writing a letter to the authorities, filling out a form, and planting a sapling to replace it. On my property. These requirements are not imposed by any community covenants or club memberships at the golf course -- it's all driven by statute.

So, by "more free," I mean being able to just go out and cut down your own fucking tree whenever you want.

Now imagine that kind of freedom across the board. What would you do differently?

Were those golf courses there before you bought your property? Was the restriction placed on the tree placed after your purchase?

It doesn't matter. I'm sure someone owned the land when the restriction was placed on the tree. Would you rather discuss whether he should have been free to cut down his own trees instead of me?

My point is that it was legal to cut the tree down, but that I had to jump through hoops to do it, and in the end I had to pay a premium to have it removed because of the liability of working in the wetland. If that sort of overhead was removed from everything you might do in life that requires "government approval," what sort additional activities would you be likely to engage in?

well i don't think i'm a fucking moron, but i would like to know what you mean. max pell grant for this year was $5500. school is fucking expensive! $5500 is a drop in the bucket. do you really think school isn't that expensive, or am i just too big a moron to understand your point?

i guess i'm wondering...is there more money out there that i don't know about?!?!??! i am pretty much as poor as you can be on paper, so i know i get the max grant, and i have damn near perfect grades and apply for every scholarship i can find...and it's still reeeeeeally expensive for me. i don't know how people with parents who make money but won't help them with school or people with average grades can even do it.

oh, and i thought of something i would do if i were free. i'd buy a condo on the middle floor of some building and paint just my portion of the outside of the building lime green so it'd be striped from the street!

He's saying that the reason college is so expensive is because of the availability of grant money - that it changes the demand relationship, because the money is available to send more people there through government grants. There's probably a little truth to this - we see a similar relationship in the Health Care industry.

However, it ignores lots of other factors:

1) Health care and education both rely on highly educated individuals, and the labor cost there because of the education requirements is extremely high.

2) the value of a college education as a means of earning more has also increased dramatically, especially as the value of the labor of those without degrees has significantly dropped

3) at the mid to high end, university is a prestige sell - the value of the education at Harvard is high, but not commiserate with the value compared to a mid tier school. However, education isn't the only thing you are selling - networking and contacts are just as important.

4) education and health care are artisanal occupations - in other words, you can't replace professors and doctors with cost saving devices. This goes back to #1.

5) College is sold as much as 'an experience' as it is a way to make a buck. Even mid range schools spend lavishly on the campus itself, as a way of attracting higher quality students. Which in turn leads to a more successful alumni, which leads to more money coming into the school. Rinse, repeat.

6) And what most people going to college don't realize - all the big schools aren't there to get you a diploma, that's secondary to academic prestige. Publish or perish, while your TAs teach your classes. That leads to grant money. So a lot of the focus on the school isn't on the kids, they are just seen as a price to pay to get the true prize, academic respect and power, which leads to better jobs for the professors and administrators, not how good of students you churn out.

Of course, that doesn't quite fit Rickie's dogmatic playbook, so he attributes it to the fact you can get a Pell grant to make yourself a more valuable member of society at what he considers his expense.

School is expensive because it's heavily subsidized. So it's annoying to see supposedly intelligent people like Demi comment on how expensive it is when he'll consistently vote for the candidate who promises the most subsidies.

I'm pretty sure the law isn't stopping you from doing that now. But if there's a community rule that governs it, then that's more of a voluntary contract that you entered into when you moved in. Do you think that rule makes you less free?

i honestly don't care. you just seemed upset that no one was playing your game, so i thought i'd try.

Not just grants. Government subsidized loans are an even bigger factor. The entire system is a third-party-payer problem. Throwing money at the situation will not solve it unless the money is being used to expand enrollment.

Every reason you give, why education may be legitimately expensive, further explains why subsidizing it drives up the price. Once you establish the rock solid resource limitations that result in only 9 seats for every 10 students, you've explained why no amount of money will create another seat. Not to mention the perverse incentives that argue against creating more seats, since ever actually solving this problem would threaten the subsidies.

If tuition was based on what you could borrow on the free market, which in turn was based on what the education would do to your earning potential and your ability to repay the loan, then two things would happen: First, the price of enrollment would be based on what education is actually worth, and, second, it would once again become profitable to increase the number of seats available to students.

They say that a thing is only worth what someone will pay for it. But when just about everybody in the buying market is using someone else's money, you can't count that part. The only part that counts is the part that distinguishes the kids who can afford a seat from the kids who can't. The millionaires' kids will always get in, and the ones who can't will always be the poorest. It doesn't matter how high the grants go.

You're right. What matters is that you didn't make yourself aware of local statutes before you bought the property. Next.

I took care of all the paperwork before the lot was even cleared. But the builder wouldn't take that tree when he cleared the rest because he didn't want the liability of working in the wetland. So I had to pay someone else a premium price to come get that tree after the house was built and purchased, which made the process even more complicated and costly.

There's a certain circular logic deficiency in arguing that I'm not less free because a law that makes me less free was already in existence before it applied to me. It has the same effect either way. And if it isn't a law that I'm aware of, it'll still happen with a dozen other laws that nobody could have been aware of until they become a problem. That's what happens in a nation of laws -- you can't help but break some of them all day long.

Same with healthcare. It's a simple economic equation. The more government tries to make something affordable by giving it away or forcing sellers into giving it away, the more expensive it becomes. Sure, healthcare and education were expensive before government became involved. And, while both were imperfect and hard to get sometimes, they were both pretty darned good in this country (i.e., a good value). Trying to avoid the realities of how economics work has mucked up the demand/supply situation with both and will continue to do so as long as we have politicians who make promises that can't possibly be met.

Simple economics: Mandating an artificially low price creates an artificially high demand. When did our educational system get so bad we forgot that?

So your real "enslavement" came not from local ordinance, but from the builder. Okay.

But, as you've just pointed out, it wasn't the law that "enslaved" you, it was the guy who built your house.

A "nation" of laws? I've never lived anywhere with the kind stupid restrictions you've chosen to live under by living where you do, so your "nation" consists of the people in your immediate community. Yanno, people with WPP, just like you.

As your kind are so fond of telling people who are unemployed: Move.

They didn't mandate an artificially low price. They increased the demand through giving people the ability to pay for the services. That's not the same as freezing the price structure. It's not that tertiary services went up to meet marginalization of the price point, but instead that the actual price point increased because more people could afford to pay it at that level.

Regardless, that's only one of many reasons things like education and health care have increased drastically in cost compared to income, as stated above. Significant, but hardly the only factor.

They have in health care and, by giving away money to pay for education, they are doing the same, indirectly, there as well.

Maybe it's not so "simple" after all, huh?

There are other reasons that education and health care are expensive, true. I acknowledged that up front. They're both valuable services and, if you want a quality product, you can expect to pay a premium. But government dictating prices has not helped the affordability situation because demand has been artificially stimulated.

Actually, except for your second item -- "the value of a college education as a means of earning more has also increased dramatically, especially as the value of the labor of those without degrees has significantly dropped" -- the rest of the "factors" you list look pretty constant. So while you can blame any of that bullshit for "high" tuition prices, most of it isn't the cause of "rising" tuitions.

What we're seeing is that the government is throwing money around in an effort to help more people buy what basically amounts to a finite resource for all the reasons you listed. The problem never was a shortage of money in the first place, and the money isn't really being used to create more resources. Instead, all the money does is raise the starting bid for an education. And the final price ends up being whatever the poorest kid who gets admitted can afford to pay.

If the Pell grant went up another $5000, so would tuitions. The very next semester.

Then why do Americans spend more per capita on health care than people in countries with government-run health care, with worse results?

Who says ours is worse?

And I'll tell you the direct cause of why our healthcare is so expensive -- Lawyers and frivolous lawsuits!!!

14th Doc beat me to it, given that Canada and Australia have more government involvement in healthcare, why aren't our systems more expensive?

The US spends more on care because our government's role is to see that people get what they pay for -- which the government defines as a very expensive product through a shit-storm of regulation -- and because Americans typically have more disposable income to spend in an area where people will generally spare no expense.

In most other countries, the government's role is to pay for your care, which it then defines as a more limited set of treatment options that spares expenses it can't justify. "Justification" is a ratio of how many months of life are gained per dollar spent.

If there's a one-in-fifty chance that an approved procedure will save your life, then an American doctor is obligated to order it (or face a potential malpractice lawsuit), and the patient's insurance company will often cover it subject to the terms of his policy. The guiding principle is "medical necessity."

But in England, for example, a panel has already decided that procedure does not add enough longevity to justify the expense of giving it to fifty people in order to save one life, and so the procedure is not in the formulary. Of course, you'll be told "we're doing all we can," but only because they can't do all the same things that are done here. The guiding principle is "comparative effectiveness."

As for "worse results," it's really an apples to oranges comparison. Greater availability and utilization of technologies like CT and MRI means that more conditions are diagnosed in the US, where doctors also have a legal responsibility to report honestly. Compare that to other countries where many "silent" medical conditions are never detected, and where the government as a healthcare provider has political incentives to assess its own performance as optimistically as possible.

Every study ever conducted? Seriously, if you don't know that other countries spend half as much and get better results even when you control for things like weight and life style then you just don't know much about the topic.

I just think we need to take up a collection to free cpurick from unscrupulous builders. For only 50 cents a day...

With the definitions in this thread, anyone who lives in a society with other people is probably enslaved.

O2C was the only legitimate attempt to answer the question. What I was specifically looking for was "I'd start my own business."

Only one guy even tried to answer it, and he mentioned startups twice.

I wonder how many others here have pondered starting their own business, being their own boss, only to drop it because of the high cost. Well, the most unnecessary of those costs are all compliance costs. Starting a business doesn't have to be expensive -- but starting one legally is. That's a problem of too much government.

Hate to burst your bubble, but I have started a business, and quite successfully. I'm no Steve Jobs, but I'm solvent. But you go right ahead and blame your own failure on the government.

You're not bursting my bubble. People do still start businesses. But not as often as they used to, because it's a lot harder than it used to be. Not the work -- the compliance.

And "solvent" is not my definition of "quite successfully."

I'm not blaming any failure on government. I'm just pointing out how much harder government makes success.

The name of the company escapes me now, but it was someone big. A founder of said company recently compared today's regulatory environment to the one in effect when they started, and he said that if they came up with the same idea from ground up today they'd never be able to get it off the ground.